Swan River (18 page)

‘There can't be many Geoffrey Baylises in Chippenham.'

‘There might not be any, but I couldn't tell you without the address.'

‘Do you mean there aren't any Geoffrey Baylises?'

‘I'm sorry. I can't tell you if you don't know the address.'

‘Please, it's very important.'

There was silence. ‘I'm not supposed to tell you this.' She was speaking more quietly and in a normal voice. ‘There's no one of that name listed.'

‘No Geoffrey Baylises? What about G. Baylis?'

‘None of them, either, dear. Sorry.'

‘Thank you… Goodbye.'

I put the phone down and stared towards the window. ‘Goodbye.' I repeated the word out loud and hurried across the hall and out of the front door, closing it quietly. I didn't want my mother to see me; I couldn't talk to her then. I had lost the person whom I now saw as my best friend.

* * * * *

That year, 1965, the shops in the King's Road changed rapidly. Sainsbury's closed and Lord John opened, a development deplored by my mother's elderly relatives, with the exception of Auntie Toto and Uncle Godfrey who liked ‘the colourful young people' and anyway bought their food in Oakeshott's and Harrods. Pat and I followed the progress of the boutiques closely; Michael's Man Boutique on the corner of Tryon Street became my favourite and Pat's was Granny Takes A Trip which was about a mile down the road on the bend before the World's End. If either of us wanted to buy a shirt or a pair of trousers we would spend an afternoon walking from Sloane Square up to ‘Granny's', examining the clothes in every shop before making a decision.

In the late summer we both wanted a pair of hipster trousers. Pat tried on a striped pair in Lord John and I tried a black pair, made of hairy, woolly material, in Michael's; they felt very strange, tight round the thighs and with the waist round the hips – I kept wanting to pull them up, but that made the legs too short and the crutch impossibly tight and ostentatious. We walked on, dropping in and trying on here and there.

After Chelsea Town Hall the boutiques stopped; Granny's was a lone outpost several blocks further on. My legs were aching by the time we got there and I sat on a chair while Pat tried on numerous pairs of hipsters and discussed them with me and the shop assistant, a girl in jeans with ironed blonde hair and false eyelashes. He eventually bought a pair with narrow green and brown stripes; I had decided to buy the black pair I had tried on in Michael's.

We took a bus back and sat upstairs on the right, smoking. The traffic moved slowly. Just after the bus passed Sydney Street we heard a man's voice say, ‘Blimey! Look at that.' The people sitting on the left were all looking out of the windows. The bus was stationary. We stood up to see what was happening and everyone else on our side of the bus stood up as well. ‘Chroist! Can you see that, Dave?' A tall girl with long blonde hair was walking past the Gaumont cinema wearing a white shirt and a light brown skirt. The skirt was at least a foot shorter than any skirt I – or, it seemed, anyone on the top of this bus – had ever seen.

On the pavement people were standing back and staring. On the bus people who didn't know each other were sharing their opinions.

‘Beautiful! Look at her thighs!'

‘Should be ashamed of herself.'

‘Phwor! She can come back to my place any time.'

‘You should be so lucky.'

‘It's disgusting.'

‘Mary Quant's miniskirt. Just launched.' A young woman with curly hair peered out of the window and spoke quietly to no one in particular.

The girl went on walking. The bus moved along slowly a few feet behind her. She crossed through the traffic and walked along the other side past the Chelsea Pet Stores. Pat and I sat down. People from the other side stood up and leaned over our heads. ‘Did you see her thighs? Chroist!'

‘Bloody amazing.' I was seeing in the street now something I had only expected to see somewhere very private sometime in the distant future.

The woman with curly hair turned round and put her hand beside her mouth. ‘We'll all be wearing them next year.' She smiled.

‘Chroist!'

* * * * *

Paul Snape dusted and polished La Frascetti regularly right up until we left school the next summer, 1966. Even when he and Pete became prefects, and a fag – to my embarrassment – cleaned our study, he insisted on looking after her himself. By then she had become a mascot to the whole house. To me she was still a symbol of freedom, but the artist had taken on as much significance as the subject, and the picture sometimes made me feel depressed; I would slouch in my worn-out chair and think about my ‘lost friends' – I articulated the phrase often inside my head. I envisaged Deborah mainly, but also Richard, Adam, Patrick, Bobby the goalkeeper and Dennis. And, as the end of our schooldays came closer, I thought about my friendships with Pete, Dave, Pat, Paul and others. Would
they
last when we no longer had the grim institution to bind us together? Except for a couple of people whom Pat and I had met more than once in the Troubador – a coffee bar in Earl's Court where we listened to folk singers and had intense conversations with long-haired women and Australian men – I knew no one outside school and my old home town.

In the end Bird found me a disappointment. My ‘A' levels wouldn't be good enough for the Oxford and Cambridge colleges he had entered me for, but, since I was not yet eighteen, I could stay at school another year and study for them again with more energy. The idea horrified me. I politely rejected it, and amid Bird's genuine show of sorrow sensed a measure of relief.

Without enthusiasm, I filled in a form applying to other universities. I had an idea of training to be a journalist, but my main aims were to be free, earn some money so that I wouldn't be dependent on my mother, wear jeans and open-necked shirts, and grow my hair.

17

Good Vibrations

Pat began working for the agency first. We cleaned people's flats and houses for five shillings an hour. Pat seemed to get wealthy single men who wanted to sit and have a chat, whereas I got harassed mothers with large houses whose children's bedrooms had to be cleaned while they were at school. I found a copy of
Penthouse
under a teenage boy's bed, glanced at it and tucked it under his mattress. Later his mother rang the agency and said I was the best cleaner she'd ever had – could I come every week? It was dull work, but I couldn't see the point of doing it badly.

I was living at my mother's and spending some of my evenings with Pat. We often met at the Helvetia in Old Compton Street, a pub with free live music, and moved on to the Marquee to see groups like Manfred Mann or the Spencer Davis Group; if we wanted to stay up most of the night we'd squeeze ourselves into Les Cousins, a hot basement in Greek Street, and listen to folk and blues – Bert Jansch and Alexis Korner.

Dave Hunt rang unexpectedly. He was in London; he had got in to one of the medical schools and was living in a bedsit in Bayswater. Apart from me and Pat, the only person he knew in the city was his older brother, who was a student. We went out drinking and were soon meeting up two or three times a week, usually in one of the pubs in the Fulham Road. We would move from Finch's to the Goat in Boots and back again, drinking Watney's Red Barrel very slowly. Dave was less wild than Pat, easier to be with, reliable and almost always smiling, if not laughing. Sometimes the three of us would go to Soho and sometimes Pat would come to Finch's.

The Goat in Boots had bare floorboards, intricately engraved glass and worn panelling, the colour of chestnuts; it had been there nearly a hundred years and little seemed to have changed. There was a singsong around an upright piano most evenings – post-war hits and music-hall favourites. Dave and I loved that, but Pat wouldn't even drink in the place. Singing ‘Daisy' while swinging a pint mug somehow connected me to the past, to the 1890s and the Norfolk Arms in Dalston, and to La Frascetti and my grandfather Tom Reynolds; this must be the kind of thing they had enjoyed.

I sometimes spent time standing alone with a pint at the bar in the Clifton, a small pub next door to the cinema. It was the name that attracted me initially, but its quiet ordinariness made me go back. It had no music, no decor, no pretensions and no crowds, just enough regulars to keep it going, and one person behind the bar – a blonde woman called Eileen – which was all it needed. Eileen was about thirty and had a certain elegance, with blonde hair swirled upwards and secured smoothly to the back of her head, black glasses with restrained wings, and a small gold cross which lay neatly on top of her red round-necked sweaters.

I went there after dinner, on evenings when I was at home with my mother. I would go out at ten, drink two pints and come back at eleven – when my mother would produce a pot of tea and a plate of bourbon biscuits and we would watch Joan Bakewell present
Late Night Line-Up
or, on Saturdays,
The Late Show
with Eleanor Bron, John Bird, John Fortune and Barry Humphries.

I always stood in the same place at the bar, in front of a Rothmans ashtray with the beer pumps to my right. I would stare vacantly at the upside-down bottles and think – about girls and what to do with my life; letters had begun to arrive that suggested that the universities weren't impressed by me and my second-rate ‘A' levels. Occasionally I talked to a civil but taciturn man called Cyril who regularly sat on a stool where the bar met the wall. He wore a jacket, shirt and tie and had scruffy shoes; he looked like the kind of man who would wear a brown coat over his shirt and tie at work – a warehouseman or a long-serving assistant in a hardware store.

Eileen told me that Cyril had flown in bombers during the war as a rear gunner. My slight knowledge of bomber crews came from the war comics I used to swap with Richard and Adam and from films, usually starring Richard Todd; the rear gunner lay flat on his stomach, isolated but for radio contact with his colleagues, and was in the most dangerous position of all. Eileen said that Cyril was a brave man; he had flown an almost record number of missions and had been shot down twice over the North Sea. But Cyril didn't want to talk about it; all he would say was, ‘You 'ad to do it, didn' yer?' He was more interested in Fulham Football Club where he had a season ticket.

* * * * *

My mother didn't believe in God but she wanted to believe in something. She had a fondness for nature and beauty and believed, with a few reservations, that science could solve the world's problems, so she joined a group of like-minded people, the London branch of the British Humanist Association, and went to lectures and parties. Bits of their literature started to accumulate on the coffee table next to my bed, and she told me they were opposed to compulsory religion in schools – I agreed with them about that. As far as I could understand, the humanists were a descendant of the nineteenth-century rationalist societies and campaigned on behalf of agnostics and atheists and to limit the power of the church; some of the people I used to see on the
Brains Trust
– Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley – were involved, and I had the feeling that Sis and Old George and my grandfather Tom would have approved.

I was tiring of cleaning houses when my mother told me that the humanists were advertising for an assistant membership secretary, part-time. I applied and got the job, and worked there every weekday afternoon in an office near High Street Kensington, logging subscriptions and mailing the members. It was easy work, I was paid, and I liked my boss, Diane, who sat at a desk across the room from me and seemed very mature and sophisticated. I discovered that she was twenty-three, and was astonished when she told me that she lived with her boyfriend, John. It seemed very unusual and, when I told Pat and Dave, they were amazed; the idea of unmarried men and women living together was a novelty – and a rather appealing one.

Diane often chatted as she put on her lipstick at the end of our working day. She always had more than one lipstick and sometimes asked my opinion. ‘John and I are going out for a few drinks. Then we're going to d'Aretusa's. What do you think?' She held two lipsticks in front of me: pink and purple.

‘That one.' I had no idea what d'Aretusa's was, but pointed to the purple. I had seen it on her before and it went with her freckles and pale skin.

‘Umm…maybe.' She went back to her desk and began wiping it onto her lips as she stared into a tiny mirror. She looked over at me, grinning mischievously. ‘You met any girls yet?' She had told me before that I ought to have a girlfriend.

‘No… I'm trying though.' I smiled awkwardly.

‘You ought to join the Young Humanists.' She giggled and blotted her mouth with a tissue. ‘You'd meet some there.' She took out a tiny brush and started putting mascara on her eyelashes. ‘Nice girls.' She smiled broadly, pushing her purple lips towards me. ‘They have a party second Friday of every month. Wine and cheese. John and I go sometimes.'

I took her advice. The party was in a dull room used for lectures, on the floor below where I worked, and I wanted to leave as soon as I entered. At a glance I could see that Diane was the youngest of the young humanists, and her minidress – purple and yellow hoops – their only colourful feature. But I meekly accepted a glass of wine, and a pineapple chunk and a piece of cheese fixed together with a cocktail stick – and found that I couldn't get away from a short woman with enormous eyelids stuccoed with green eyeshadow. We discussed the virtues of humanism while an angular man with an intense expression looked on and said nothing. She talked a lot and had a standard reply to my small contributions to the conversation: ‘Well. This is it' – she left the ‘t' off ‘it' and drew out the vowel in an extended vibrato like an air-raid siren winding down. Except for Diane, the young humanists were too old for me.

* * * * *

I tried, and usually managed, to visit my father every third weekend – by then he had been retired for more than two years and would soon be seventy-five. I liked my room in Beaconsfield; it wasn't big and the wallpaper was brown and dowdy, but it was old with a sloping floor and a Georgian window, and it was the only room I had that was my own. I hung up Deborah's drawing of La Frascetti, and often gazed at her as I lay in bed.

It still amazed me to think that my father could remember her practising and performing so long ago, in the nineteenth century. Since his retirement, my father's shoulders had become rounder, his legs had gradually stiffened and his deafness had worsened – his game efforts to guess what people were saying when they spoke quietly sometimes provoked cruel merriment. When I stayed with him now, I often felt that
I
was looking after
him
; except for driving I could do all the dull, practical things – shopping, cooking, sweeping the carpet, turning on the television – more quickly than he could. And when he drove, I sometimes told him when to change gear because he couldn't hear the engine.

I began to wonder what the point of it all was, if in the end you just grew old and died. My father's answer was that we were all part of nature and that everyone had a duty to preserve and enhance the lives of their fellow men. That was the point. You could call nature God, if you liked, but it made no difference. This seemed to have given him a
raison d'être
and he felt that he had done his best for mankind with his involvement in politics and his efforts to make people think by writing books and talking to anyone who would listen. He also thought that one of his achievements was that he had made a lot of people laugh; he often said that he wanted to be remembered for that. It was true, I thought; when I was a child his sense of fun had seemed to balance his ability to be cruel.

And now he wasn't cruel; he seemed fairly content, more at ease than when he'd worked and lived with my mother. His temper had faded and he spent most of his time writing – essays, poems, observations and reworkings of bits of his life. We still drove to farms – betting on what we might see over the next hill – and I patted dogs while he discussed yields, leys and the Milk Marketing Board with old friends. We played games, discussed the big issues – current and eternal – and laughed at absurdities and our favourite comedies on television –
The Arthur Haynes Show
,
Frankie Howerd
and
Till Death Us Do Part
.

But now, when I left him after my short visits, he seemed small and vulnerable – and, though he never said it, lonely; he told me, without irony or self-pity, that the local chemist and the newsagent were his best friends. As I walked off to catch a bus or hitchhike back to London, I felt sadness – physically, in the bones of my arms and legs. It was a feeling close to pity, and I didn't want to feel that, but I couldn't help myself. I didn't expect him to die yet, but the physical effects of age had brought his death forward, from somewhere unimaginable beyond the horizon, to a blurred sort of focus in the middle distance.

In a sense his closest friend was a good-natured blue budgerigar called Joey, who had been given to him by Wing Commander Hayes. During daylight Joey had the freedom of my father's living room and spent much time perched on his shoulder cheeping quietly into his ear. My father spoke to him frequently, not just to let him know what was happening but to inform him about important issues. I overheard Joey being made aware that ‘Spinoza may have been a determinist, but he was a much nicer man than Leibniz' and that ‘the Americans should never have been in Vietnam and they should get out
now
'. Joey usually replied ‘Nice one, Cyril' – a reference to one of my father's and my great heroes, Cyril Knowles, the Tottenham Hotspur left back – but not always: ‘Cogito ergo sum', ‘God strewth!' and ‘That's my son, David' were all repeated several times a day. When it got dark my father would get Joey to perch on his finger, return him to his cage and throw a thick cloth over it.

Even though he was less volatile than he used to be, I waited until he was in an obvious good mood before telling him that I probably wouldn't be going to university. I was certain that he would be angry; he valued education more than anything and would castigate me for wasting an opportunity. After a quiet afternoon reading, playing chess and talking, he put Joey to bed and began to poke the fire.

‘Dad, you probably won't be very pleased about this but I don't think I'll be going to university. My ‘A' levels don't seem to be good enough, and I think – '

‘You'd've got better ‘A' levels at a grammar school.' He gestured despairingly with his hands. ‘Wouldn't've been distracted by those idle toffs.' He shook his head and asked what I was going to do.

I told him about my job with the humanists for the first time and was going to mention journalism, but he interrupted.

‘Well, I started as an office boy at sixteen. Can't do you any harm at eighteen.' He smiled, raised his eyebrows and leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece. ‘Humanists are a good thing.' He didn't seem to mind about university; I was relieved, but at the same time almost disappointed.

‘Self-help! That's the answer. I don't suppose you've read it yet?'

I shook my head. He had given me a copy of Samuel Smiles's Victorian classic,
Self-Help
, the previous Christmas. It was quarter-bound in leather and was inscribed ‘To Cliff from Mother, 10th December, 1910' – his nineteenth birthday. Underneath my father had written ‘and to my son Bob on December 18th, 1930' and underneath that ‘and to my second son, David, at Xmas 1965'. I had wondered whether Bob had read it and how it had come back into my father's possession.

‘Well, try to have a look at it.' He sat down in his armchair with a slight thump. ‘It's very good advice. The bits about Arkwright, Stevenson… Peel, Disraeli… the
elder
Disraeli… are very good, very inspirational.'